ABOUT THE BOOK

The beginning of the story is a curious fact: In 1699, Louis X1V of France sent an embassy to the most mysterious and fabled of oriental sovereigns, the Negus, or King, of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia). Louis' hope was to lure that country, nominally Christian for centuries, into the political and religious orbit of France.

Jean-Baptiste Poncet, gifted young apothecary/physician to the pashas of Cairo, is the hero of this romantic epic embroidering upon the known details of that long-forgotten embassy. Selected by the French consul to lead the mission, Poncet travels through the deserts of Egypt and Sinai and the mountains of Abyssinia to the court of the Negus, thence to Versailles and back again. Along the way he falls madly in love with the consul's daughter, deals with the intrigues of his fanatical Jesuit travelling companions, treats the Negus for a mysterious skin ailment, and gains a disastrous audience with the king of France.

Friendship, humor, love, and discovery infuse this gorgeous adventure, but there is a more serious theme as well. Poncet discovers the splendors of an exotic empire and civilization, and, thanks to him, Ethiopia will escape foreign conquest and preserve its mystery into our own times. In this internationally best-selling novel, Jean-Christophe Rufin yokes the elegant language of the French enlightenment with the storytelling of Alexandre Dumas to bring us a splendid parable of liberty, religious fanaticism, and the possibility of happiness.

Jean-Christophe Rufin, a doctor, was born in 1952. As an official with the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières, he has journeyed to war-torn regions such as Sri Lanka and Kurdistan to administer aid; he helped coordinate famine aid in Ethiopia and witnessed both the Sandinista uprising in Nicaragua and the downfall of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. In 1993 he led the French Defense Ministry's humanitarian mission to Bosnia and in 1994 travelled to Rwanda with the French armed forces' Opèration Turquoise. Rufin lives in France.